


Hush Little Baby Don't You Cry

by rachel614



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Apocalypse Scenario, F/M, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Inspired by The Rigel Black Chronicles, Mental Instability, Rigel Black Chronicles Masquerade 2021, Unhappy/Ambiguous Ending, Victorian Flower Language, also flower meanings because i decided i am too nice to leave u like this, now has a summary because i forgot the first time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-28
Updated: 2021-01-28
Packaged: 2021-03-14 17:00:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29049558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rachel614/pseuds/rachel614
Summary: this is not a pipe
Relationships: Caelum Lestrange/Harriet Potter | Rigel Black
Comments: 27
Kudos: 38
Collections: Rigel Black Chronicles Masquerade 2021





	Hush Little Baby Don't You Cry

“Idiot.”

The chill whisper shivered down her spine, tasting faintly of affection and regret.  
Harry did not pause in her chopping, refusing to acknowledge the ghosts of her past. She was brewing her latest attempt at the Cure, and she could not afford to be distracted.  
“She won’t listen, Severus. She never did.”   
Harry chopped faster, hoping the thud of her knife might drown out the all-too familiar arrogant drawl.  
“Shut up, Riddle. You don’t own me anymore.” Her mentor’s voice was sharp and hollow all at once, with an edge she’d never seen directed at Riddle in life, tempered by the knowledge that—well, neither of them were really alive anymore.  
“Ah yes, another thing to lay at the feet of our dear Rigel. Half-blood Imposter and Potions Mistress, Champion of the Oppressed and Adventor of the Apocalypse. Aren’t you so proud of her?” 

The knife slipped. Her magic rushed in to heal the cut, but it was too late. Her blood spilled over the chopped gurdyroots, spoiling them. Hissing, she dropped the knife and vanished the roots and blood with a thought.

She stood there, hands clenching the edge of the table, and tried to will away the tears that burned in her eyes. It wasn’t the first time that she’d heard the title, but Riddle always had a way of getting under her skin—especially when he was only pointing out the truth.

“It’s my fault, more than hers.” Hermione’s voice was like a dagger in her heart. She hardly ever spoke—only Riddle ever felt the need to fill the hours of silence with his own voice—and so usually Harry could pretend that she wasn’t there, that the glimpses of wild curls and wool sweaters that teased the corner of her eye weren’t the reason for Archie’s blank, hateful gaze.

Not that Archie spent much time gazing at anything, anymore.

“You discovered how we absorb magic. She’s the one who brewed a disastrous cure and thought it would be clever to use the Sleeping Sickness as a vector.”  
“I agreed. We all did.”  
“And we all died. Except her. She gets to carry on, wasting her time and boring us to tears. You’ll forgive me if I have little patience with her self pity.”  
“Shut up, Riddle,” another painfully familiar voice drawled, and it was all she could do not to flinch again. “I have the ability to make this time infinitely more irritating for you. It’s one of my many talents.”

There was no response to that. Harry took a shuddering breath and vanished the contents of the cauldron as well. She’d missed the opportunity to add the next ingredient, and the potion was ruined. With slow, controlled motions, she cleaned her station, and cast one lingering glance across the room, pretending she couldn’t see the horde of ghosts, before turning to trudge up the stairs.  
“Poor child,” Narcissa’s soft sigh followed her.

Harry roughly brushed the tears from her cheeks, and paused at the entrance of the kitchen to ask her magic to hide the signs of her crying before going in.  
“Dad?” Her father was slumped over the kitchen table, head in his hands. There was an open book in front of him, but it was on the same page it had been when she’d left him there some hours before. He looked up at her words, and the utter despair and exhaustion in his face was like another punch to the gut.  
“Harry. You’re up early.” There was no hint of accusation in his voice, but Harry felt it all the same. It was her fault. It was all her fault.  
“I was distracted, and messed up the batch. I’ll try again after dinner.”  
Her father nodded, but she suspected he wasn’t really listening.

A glimmer of red in the corner of her eye told Harry that her mother was here, and she busied herself making dinner. Learning to cook hadn’t been too difficult—it was a less complicated version of potions-making after all, and she had learnt a few tricks from Leo before he’d succumbed to the coma. In a matter of minutes she had a thick stew boiling away on the stove. It would be ready in a half hour, and then they could eat.

She looked at her dad again, and her mother’s taut, unhappy face where she stood behind him, hands resting gently on his shoulders. Her mother was looking directly at her, and instinctively she began to turn away until she noticed the silvery lines on her mother’s face. Eyes widening, she looked more closely, and realised—Lily was crying. A terrible thought struck her, but it took her a moment to remember how to work her tongue properly.  
“Dad? Where’s Addy?”  
Something in her father’s face seemed to fracture and fall apart, mirroring the world around them and her own heart.  
“They took her this morning,” he said dully, and began to silently weep, his broad shoulders shaking with the force of his sobs.

Harry felt numb. She’d never thought. **.**.

The Sickness had taken the strongest first—those powerfully gifted with magic, and with Dom’s assistance, occlumency as well. It had been meant to cure the fade, so they’d done everything they could to make it affect purebloods more strongly. But something had gone wrong, and instead of fixing the mechanism to absorb magic, her cure had broken it. One by one, the most powerful witches and wizards in Britain had fallen into a coma, and never woken up. Her team—Hermione, Snape, Caelum, and even Riddle—had been the first to go, crippling her efforts to understand what had gone wrong. Dom had merged with the Sickness to aid it in passing occlumency barriers, and so the overgrown rock was no help either (a victim, another victim of her pride—). The people who had held out the longest were those with average magic or undisciplined minds, the children **.**. **.**.and her. She didn’t know why she hadn’t succumbed with the rest of her team, and she hadn’t dared to leave the safety of Potter Place in over three months. She’d spent every spare moment in her lab, desperately looking for anything that might reverse what she’d done.

But now Addy was gone, along with Sirius and Remus and Archie and everyone else, and there was no more time.

She drew in a gasping, shaking breath, and stumbled forward to her father, whose quiet sobs had subsided into slow, even breaths.

The slow even breaths of sleep.

“Dad. Dad—Dad, please—” she shook his shoulders, but it was useless. He was gone. She was alone.  
“Oh, Harry,” her mother whispered, and Harry shivered at her cold embrace. “Oh, my darling girl.” Harry was weeping, helplessly.   
“No. He can’t—I’ve got to fix this. I need to fix this, make everything go away…”  
She pushed through her mother, and tore down the steps into the lab. The eyes of her victims were there, waiting. Watching her, in silent accusation.

Hermione. Snape. Riddle.  
Sirius, Remus, Archie.  
Draco and his parents, Pansy and the other Slytherins, Leo and her friends from the Alleys, the Weasley’s—  
And her parents, little Addy in her father’s arms. She was only five. Too young to die.

For the first time since they’d begun to appear to her, she met their gazes and returned them, acknowledging their presence.  
“I don’t have much time. I don’t have many ingredients. I’ve got no ideas, nothing but you. So tell me what to do.” There was a startled silence, then one of the figures stepped forwards, raking a pale hand through his dark curls.  
“Well, Potter,” Caelum Lestrange drawled, his beautiful face drawn into an achingly familiar smirk. “It’s about time you recognised you are in the presence of your betters, but you know what must be done. Halfblood.”

She smiled back at him, a bleeding, broken thing.  
“Yes,” she said. “I do.” She lay out her remaining ingredients, most of them from her mother’s garden. There was no time to experiment, to plan; her only choice was to do what she should have done from the start: freebrew, and damn the consequences.

Asphodel. Wormwood and Yew. A dried white rose, with the thorns removed. Sweet Tussilage with a heavy mash of eglantine petals. An infusion of poppy oil. An entire Monkshood plant, dug up at the new moon. The bark of a black poplar, and the shredded leaves of a black mulberry. Mistletoe berries and the roots of a marigold. 

As she reached the end, her motions slowed. The potion was a vivid, sickly green colour, but when she dropped in the hyssop leaves, crushed and bound with cypress stems, it turned a molten gold, filling the lab with a soft, minty scent.  
She lifted her hand to put out the flame, then stopped. The potion was complete, stable both magically and physically—but still she hesitated. She looked over the remaining ingredients scattered across her work table, until her eyes fell on the tiny snowdrops, their white petals almost seeming to glow.

Hope. Her potion was a wild gamble, unlikely to work. But there was nothing left, no other option, no other hope. She looked up to meet Caelum’s steady gaze.  
“Get on with it, halfblood,” he said gently. He placed his chill, insubstantial hand on hers, and together they added the snowdrops.

There was no discernible difference in the potion, but then hope wasn’t something tangible. It never made any difference, except in what one chose to do, and in that it made all the difference in the world.  
She looked at them all; all her ghosts, while she waited for the potion to cool. “I’m sorry,” she said, barely audible. She was so very tired.   
When the potion was cool enough, she filled a goblet, lifted it to her lips, and drank. Setting the goblet down on the table with a cool click, she shook her head when a wave of drowsiness swept over her. Sighing, she sank down onto the floor, leaning her back against the wall.

She felt Caelum’s hand holding hers, and her mother’s sweeping through her tangled hair. They felt real, somehow, more real than the floor she sat on.   
Draco and Pansy sat across from her, smiling sadly. She’d missed their smiles, these last few years.  
“Go to sleep, now, darling,” Lily breathed into her ear. “It’s alright. You’ve done alright, now.”

And Harry Potter closed her eyes and breathed her last, surrounded by the ghosts that only she could see.

**Author's Note:**

> AN: many thanks to my anonymous beta, who shall henceforth be known as beta-mcbeta-face to preserve said anonymity
> 
> you may wish to look up the flower meanings  
> groupings were deliberate also most of these plants are poisonous to ingest so there’s that
> 
> also kudos to all you who read this when the new chapter(s) dropped
> 
> EDIT: ok icaved so here's some flower power for u
> 
> asphodel-regret  
> wormwood-absence  
> yew-sadness  
> white rose, dried-death is preferable to loss of innocence (thorns removed=acceptance of death)  
> Tussilage-justice shall be done to you  
> eglantine-i wound to heal  
> Poppy-sleep, my bane, my antidote  
> monkshood-chivalry (the new moon is a time of darkness, but also rebirth)  
> black poplar-courage  
> black mulberry-I shall not survive you  
> Mistletoe-i surmount difficulties  
> marigold-grief  
> hyssop-cleansing, sacrifice (crushed for minty scent...because i like mint)  
> cypress-death  
> snowdrop-hope
> 
> did i just throw in a bunch of random meanings and hope for the best? i am officialyy a free brewer, cheers


End file.
